Synopsis
Robert Harbert, better known as Harb, is Executive Vice President in Charge of Total Quality. CaroleAnne Winter is the assistant who runs his life. But even Harb can't ignore that CaroleAnne's behavior is increasingly peculiar. At the same time, the vagaries of corporate power shift, and suddenly, both Harb and his Total Quality mandate are vulnerable. It's at this moment that CaroleAnne levels a stunning charge: that she has been the target of an organized campaign of sexual harassment from her first days at the company. The investigation she demands will reach to the highest levels of the corporation-and at its center, she insists, must be the greatest offender of all: Harb.
The New Yorker
Bing's satires of the business world have the allure of inside dope, given that their pseudonymous author is also a corporate executive. His latest novel concerns one Robert (Harb) Harbert, who seems too human to last at the Global Fiduciary Trust Company: "More than one fellow officer had told him that his need to trivialize and ridicule corporate life would get the better of him one of these days." In fact, Harb's undoing is his compassion for his secretary, an apparently vulnerable creature named CarolAnne. She repays his cloying kindnesses (generous raises, a car, an apartment) with a harassment suit. The second half of the novel is a series of transcripts from the trial. Unfortunately, the courtroom animates Bing's comic gift less effectively than the daily grind of the office and the soul-smothering masquerade of being a company man.